JUDY VALENTE, correspondent: It may look like a pep rally, but at Holy Family Ministries they call this chapel—the Wednesday afternoon worship service. Outside these walls is one of the highest crime neighborhoods in Illinois. In here, the students are enthusiastic and well-behaved.

“God is good…”

VALENTE: Holy Family Ministries calls itself a new model for Christian education at a time when faith-based schools, especially those in the inner cities, struggle to stay alive.

DR. MARTIN MARTY: They have always struggled, I think you’d say, but the only time they didn’t is when they were tied to a single congregation, a single parish, where every parent had a child, and they automatically supported it.

VALENTE: As neighborhoods change and congregations shrink, there aren’t enough students, parents, or dollars to support faith-based schools. Susan Work is president of Holy Family Ministries.

SUSAN WORK (President, Holy Family Ministries): These schools are the jewels of their neighborhood, and we need to save them. But we can only save them if we have economic models that are more sustainable than one parish, one school.

VALENTE: Holy Family Ministries dispensed with the traditional model of a church school to pass on doctrine. Instead, it created an umbrella organization that offers a variety of social programs in addition to classroom instruction. The idea isn’t to proselytize, but to instill ethics and values.

VALENTE: Holy Family started in 1985 as a small Lutheran school. It raised $7 million in private funds to build this facility three years ago. Today, Holy Family is a nonprofit social services center and an Episcopal charity, as well as a Christian school.

WORK: We’ve had census workers training in here, we have wedding receptions, we’ve had a lot of baby showers, birthday parties, funeral repasts, just all kinds of things. By having a not-for-profit entity over everything we could access some other sources of funding that we would not otherwise be able to attract if we just stayed as Holy Family Lutheran School, a private school.

VALENTE: Only fifteen percent of Holy Family’s income comes from tuition. It gets the rest from private donors, grants, and government.

Voice on school intercom: “Good morning Holy Family….”

VALENTE: To tap into that broad donor base, Holy Family draws a careful line between its social programs, which receive funding from the government and other secular sources, and its faith-based school, where the day begins with prayer followed by a mission statement.

School children reciting mission statement: We, the students of Holy Family School, faithfully commit ourselves to spiritual growth and Christian values….

WORK: I love the mission statement because parents wrote it. The children pledge to listen to God, accomplish miracles, and be the best that they can be each and every day.

School children: … and to be the best we can be each and every day.

Classroom singing: “There are seven days, there are seven days, there are seven days in the week….”

VALENTE: This is part of Holy Family’s secular outreach: a preschool program funded by the Chicago public schools.

WORK: Chicago Public Schools doesn’t really care where the program is delivered. They’re interest is in seeing that at-risk children all have a preschool experience that will prepare them for later success.

VALENTE: The preschool program has its own director and budget and offers no religious instruction or activities.

WORK: There’s a lot of research out right now about preschool that shows a correlation with later life outcomes. For example, lower rates of incarceration, lower dropout rates for high school, increased entrance into college.

VALENTE: Holy Family’s after-school programs, which emphasize fitness, and its nine-week summer camp are also secular. Both are funded by the government.

WORK: They are subsidies provided to parents to enable them to be out in the workforce. It subsidizes their childcare so that the parents can work.

Student: And now we have to do our multiples…

VALENTE: But from 8 am to 4 pm, Holy Family is a faith-based school for 200 children, kindergarten through eighth grade.

WORK: Teachers do what they’re comfortable with. We don’t impose a certain amount of religious activity in any teacher’s classroom.

VALENTE: Formal religious instruction takes place on Wednesdays.

Teacher: We’ve already talked about the spiritual life and our prayer life…

WORK: Our goal with every child is that they would have a personal relationship with God by the time they leave this school.

VALENTE: But the emphasis is on academics. Holy Family has a 100 percent graduation rate, and in the past five years nearly 90 percent of its students have gone on to either private high schools—with scholarships—or charter schools.

WORK: We want to turn out children of faith, but we know that those kids have to have skills. Otherwise, we’ve turned out wonderful human beings who don’t have a job.

VALENTE: This is what the Wednesday chapel service looks like.

WORK: We’re not putting up any barriers that would keep people of various faiths from joining in the fun. We make faith development a very lively and attractive part of our program here, and we just try and keep it accessible to all the children, no matter what their background is.

VALENTE: For the parents, religion is not the most important thing here. Martin Marty:

MARTY: They simply want the best education for their child. Trust is the big thing. They trust them to affirm the best in the family values. The schools are usually small enough that the teachers get to know everyone.

VALENTE: Tuition is $7200, but the school pays more than half of that and must raise more than a million dollars a year to do it. At events like this it tries to broaden its donor base by touting Holy Family as an investment in the community.

CHERYL COLLINS (Principal, Holy Family School): It’s safe, it’s affordable, it’s faith-based, and Holy Family gets results. It’s not uncommon at 3:00 to hear sirens instead of school bells in our neighborhood, and the sirens are going to these schools because there are gang fights and gang activity that take place.

Malik: My name is Malik and I’m in fourth grade.

VALENTE: To reach more affluent people Holy Family put its development office 30 miles away in the prosperous suburbs of Chicago’s North Shore. Half its income comes from donors, and that includes more than thirty congregations in the Chicago area.

Malik: Teachers and tutors help us, and then we can make better grades. I know, because I have been on the honor roll many times.

VALENTE: Michael Berkowitz is a business leader who caught the Holy Family spirit.

MICHAEL BERKOWITZ: It’s not about the faith ofwhat I believe in or what the students believe in. It’s the fact of the goodness that’s being done here. It has nothing to do with the religion, as far as why I would contribute my time and money. It has to do with how well they are treating students.

VALENTE: Martin Marty thinks other faith-based schools, including those that are Catholic, would do well to emulate Holy Family’s approach.

MARTY: I think the model of the faith-based schools would be an excellent model for Catholicism. They are just seeing their parochial schools die by the hundreds across the nation every year. I’ve been spending enough of my life on campuses to know how conservative, structurally, educational institutions are. If we’ve always done it that way, it’s awfully hard to think of the new.

Singing at service: “Lean on me…”

WORK: Sure, we’re one school, but we’re turning out leaders for the community for tomorrow. We’re turning out the kids who are going to be able to finish college—not just get in, but finish—and have good careers.

Singing: “Lift every voice…”

WORK: Also, I think we’re affecting the community in a less measurable way by the symbol of hope and optimism that we have brought into this neighborhood.

VALENTE: Supporters of Holy Family believe that as long as it can keep the lights on and the books open it can transform this part of the city—one child at a time.

For Religion & Ethics NewsWeekly I’m Judy Valente in Chicago.

“These schools are the jewels of their neighborhood, and we need to save them,” says Susan Work, president of Holy Family Ministries in Chicago./wnet/religionandethics/files/2011/04/thumb01-holyfamilyministrie.jpg

]]>http://www.pbs.org/wnet/religionandethics/2012/03/02/april-15-2011-holy-family-ministries/8590/feed/3African-American,Chicago,Education,Faith-based,Holy Family Ministries,inner city,Martin Marty,parochial,religious schools,social services,Susan Work"These schools are the jewels of their neighborhood, and we need to save them," says Susan Work, president of Holy Family Ministries in Chicago."These schools are the jewels of their neighborhood, and we need to save them," says Susan Work, president of Holy Family Ministries in Chicago.Religion & Ethics NewsWeeklyno8:55 Supreme Court: Ministerial Exceptionhttp://www.pbs.org/wnet/religionandethics/2011/10/07/october-7-2011-supreme-court-ministerial-exception/9664/
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KIM LAWTON, correspondent: The case involves Cheryl Perich, a fourth-grade teacher at a Lutheran Church Missouri-Synod school in Michigan who mainly taught secular subjects, but also taught religion and led prayers. She took a leave of absence to get treatment for a sleep disorder. When the school was reluctant to let her return, she threatened to sue for violation of the Americans With Disabilities Act.

CHERYL PERICH: I can’t fathom how the Constitution would be interpreted in such a way as to deny me my civil rights as an elementary school teacher. I sure hope the Court agrees.

LAWTON: Lawyers for the school said Perich was considered a commissioned minister, and therefore she was covered by a legal doctrine known as the ministerial exception. That exception says religious groups don’t have to follow anti-discrimination laws in employment decisions about their leaders.

DOUGLAS LAYCOCK (University of Virginia School of Law): Disputes between ministers and their churches, if anything is covered by separation of church and state this is it. These cases do not belong in the civil courts.

LAWTON: For almost 40 years, lower courts have granted houses of worship and other religious institutions this exception. The idea is that under the First Amendment’s religious freedom guarantees, courts should not get involved in a religious institution’s decisions about hiring and firing its ministers. But how far should that exception extend?

Luke Goodrich is deputy national litigation director at the Becket Fund for Religious Liberty, which is representing the church and school in this case.

LUKE GOODRICH: Our Constitution recognizes that the government and the church are separate entities with separate roles in society and that they shouldn’t be allowed to intrude on each other. So the church doesn’t get to pick government leaders, and the government doesn’t get to pick church leaders.

LAWTON: But some argue that the ministerial exception has been taken too far. Barry Lynn is executive director of Americans United for Separation of Church and State. He’s also both a lawyer and a United Church of Christ minister.

BARRY LYNN (Americans United for Separation of Church and State): Unfortunately, I think some religious organizations use this idea of a ministerial exception as a pretext to dismiss people on the basis of their color, their gender, their racial background, or their disability, and that really runs counter to every principle of, I think, morality and every principle of our civil rights system.

LAWTON: Goodrich says the larger religious liberty principle is too important to have juries deciding what was a religious motive for hiring or firing.

GOODRICH: Even if a church may not be acting, you know, may have mixed motives, it is important to allow the church to decide, because you have a lot of cases where there aren’t mixed motives, and the church makes a purely religious decision. But if you allow juries and courts to second-guess that, churches will not be free to make decisions based on their religious beliefs.

LYNN: Courts are good at determining whether something is a sincerely held belief. We do it with conscientious objectors to war. This is just another red herring added by some religious groups that frankly want, if not themselves, others to be able to discriminate on any basis.

LAWTON: One of the most difficult questions is determining who is a minister. Is it only those who have been ordained? What about ministers of music or online ministers or teachers at religious schools?

LYNN: Unfortunately, judge-made law—some very strange judge-made law—suggests that this is a very broad idea, that it encompasses virtually all of the employees of a ministry, of a religious body, if the religious body just says you are all really ministers and thereby precludes them from filing civil rights lawsuits.

LAWTON: Many religious groups say it shouldn’t be up to the government to decide what duties are ministerial in nature.

GOODRICH: The Becket Fund’s position in this case is that the court should look at whether the employee performs important religious functions, and that includes teaching religion, leading prayer, and leading worship. If the person at issue is responsible for proclaiming the church’s message to the rest of the world, that would bring them within the ministerial exception, because the church needs to be able to choose who’s going to carry its message to the rest of the world.

LAWTON: The Obama administration is taking a hard line in the case. To the dismay of many religious groups, the Justice Department urged the Court to reject the ministerial exception altogether, saying the First Amendment doesn’t offer such special protection.

KIM COLBY (Christian Legal Society): It’s very troubling that the United States government wants 40 years of law protecting this vital religious liberty, this vital component of separation of church and state—they want it repealed by the Court.

LAWTON: If the High Court keeps a ministerial exception, the Justice Department argued that it should be limited to employees who perform “exclusively religious functions.” Religious groups say that definition is unworkable because virtually all ministers do a variety of tasks that on their surface may not appear to be religious.

GOODRICH: Even the archbishop has secular responsibilities, whether it’s managing personnel or managing the finances. Even the pastor of your local churches has secular responsibilities. A lot of pastors help take care of the building, mow the lawn on the weekends, so nobody does only religious activities.

LAWTON: Lynn supports keeping a ministerial exception but says it should be narrowly defined.

LYNN: The way this could be looked at is a very narrow exception for pastors and for other people who have primarily religious functions, while other people who at best might give a prayer occasionally over cookies and milk at a religious school will not be considered a minister, and if they are fired for the wrong reason, on the basis of gender, on the basis of disability, on the basis of race, they can get into a courtroom.

LAWTON: On the other side, nearly a hundred diverse religious groups filed briefs supporting the church’s right to choose its own ministers.

RABBI DAVID SAPERSTEIN (Religious Action Center of Reform Judaism): It seems all of us, even those of us who are deeply committed to civil rights, to protection of disability rights, to preventing retaliation for claims believe strongly that church autonomy and the ministerial exception are indispensable to religious freedom.

LAWTON: The US Conference of Catholic Bishops, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, the Episcopal Presiding Bishop, and the Union of Orthodox Jewish Congregations joined together on one of the briefs. They said “when the dispute is between the church and the church member who seeks to serve in ministry, there is no occasion—no justification whatsoever—for the state to become involved.”

Lower courts have been wrestling over the ministerial exception for decades, but this is the first time the Supreme Court has taken up the issue. A decision is expected by early next year.

I’m Kim Lawton in Washington.

/wnet/religionandethics/files/2011/10/thumb01-minsterialexception.jpg“If anything is covered by separation of church and state, this is it,” says lawyer Douglas Laycock, who argued for the Hosanna-Tabor Lutheran Church and School, and nearly 100 diverse religious groups filed briefs supporting a church’s right to choose its own ministers.

]]>http://www.pbs.org/wnet/religionandethics/2011/10/07/october-7-2011-supreme-court-ministerial-exception/9664/feed/5Barry Lynn,Cheryl Perich,discrimination,employment,Luke Goodrich,ministerial exception,religious schools,Separation of Church and State,Supreme Court"If anything is covered by separation of church and state, this is it,” says lawyer Douglas Laycock, who argued for the Hosanna-Tabor Lutheran Church and School, and nearly 100 diverse religious groups filed briefs supporting a church’s right to choose..."If anything is covered by separation of church and state, this is it,” says lawyer Douglas Laycock, who argued for the Hosanna-Tabor Lutheran Church and School, and nearly 100 diverse religious groups filed briefs supporting a church’s right to choose its own ministers.Religion & Ethics NewsWeeklyno6:45 News Roundtablehttp://www.pbs.org/wnet/religionandethics/2011/04/08/april-8-2011-news-roundtable/8571/
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BOB ABERNETHY, host: Analysis and discussion of some of the week’s news now with Kim Lawton, managing editor of this program, and Kevin Eckstrom, editor of Religion News Service. Welcome to you both. Kevin, an obscure publicity-seeking pastor in Florida oversees the burning of a Quran, and there are deadly riots in Afghanistan.

KEVIN ECKSTROM (Editor, Religion News Service): Right. It’s a real challenge for this country because the more attention that people pay to him the more he’s sort of egged on to keep doing this kind of thing. But if we don’t pay attention to what he’s doing, the Muslim world thinks that we don’t care whether or not Qurans are being burned in the United States or that they think that maybe all Christians or all Americans are burning Qurans when that’s clearly not the case. But it’s a real pickle as to how much legitimacy you give this guy, because the more he gets, the more he’s going keep going.

KIM LAWTON (Managing Editor, Religion & Ethics NewsWeekly): And what actually happened was he had a mock trial where he put the Quran on trial, and he actually had an imam speak in defense of the Quran, but in the end the Quran was found guilty, and that’s when the burning occurred. That was put on the Facebook page, on his Facebook page. It was put on Youtube. But it happened on March 20. The riots happened quite awhile after that, in part because local leaders, Muslim leaders in Afghanistan, manipulated it. You know, people in the country there didn’t necessarily know about it. Most Americans didn’t know about it, except for the fact that people went through with loudspeakers in some of these towns, and there was also an allegation that hundreds of Qurans were burned here. So there was a lot of manipulation about what really happened as well, for a lot of different political purposes.

ABERNETHY: Another frustration: the ideological stand-off in Washington over the budget.

LAWTON: Well, Republicans this week unveiled—while Congress was talking about how are we going to fund the rest of this year, the Republicans also unveiled their blueprint for 2012 and beyond, and they proposed a very radical restructuring of Medicare/Medicaid, some of those other programs. The congressman who introduced it said it was a moral obligation to do something about Medicare/Medicaid, because it just is simply unsustainable in its current effect, and that has a lot of religious groups talking and debating.

ECKSTROM: Right, and right now we are talking about, you know, a hundred million for this, two hundred million for that. It’s relatively small potatoes. What’s important about this Republican plan is that it’s a big-picture, long-term ideological blueprint for how we should fund the government and fund the services, and the bottom line is that it proposes taking in less revenue through lower taxes on corporations and the wealthy, at the same time cutting services to folks who really can’t afford to have those services cut. So a lot of religious groups say that it’s immoral budgeting to be able to try to balance the budget on the backs of the folks who can’t afford to.

ABERNETHY: And Kim, there was a Supreme Court decision this week that worried a lot of people interested in the separation of church and state.

LAWTON: Well, the justices in a very close decision rejected a challenge to a program in Arizona that gave tax credits that eventually got funneled to private schools, mostly religious schools in that particular case. Some taxpayers had challenged that, saying that’s an establishment of religion, and the court said those people didn’t have the standing or the legal right to bring forward that case, so it’s going to make these challenges to church-state cases more difficult in the future.

ECKSTROM: Right. Since 1968 Americans have had a right to challenge these sorts of cases when they think that the government is improperly funding religion. The Supreme Court has said that. And what’s happened in this case and then in a 2007 case, a challenge against the White House faith-based office, is the court is really tightening the screws on this, on making it harder for people to challenge these programs that they think are unconstitutional.

ABERNETHY: So looking around we have humanitarian crises all over the place, we have natural disasters, we have budget stand-offs.

We review some of the week’s leading religion news stories, from deadly riots in Afghanistan over the burning of a Quran at a Florida church to the morality of the budget to a church-state decision from the Supreme Court./wnet/religionandethics/files/2011/04/thumb01-news-apr2011.jpg

]]>http://www.pbs.org/wnet/religionandethics/2011/04/08/april-8-2011-news-roundtable/8571/feed/1Afghanistan,Congress,federal budget,International Burn a Quran Day,Muslim,quran,religious schools,Republicans,Separation of Church and State,spending cuts,Supreme Court,taxesWe review some of the week's leading religion news stories, from deadly riots in Afghanistan over the burning of a Quran at a Florida church to the morality of the budget to a church-state decision from the Supreme Court.We review some of the week's leading religion news stories, from deadly riots in Afghanistan over the burning of a Quran at a Florida church to the morality of the budget to a church-state decision from the Supreme Court.Religion & Ethics NewsWeeklyno4:12 Islamic Schoolhttp://www.pbs.org/wnet/religionandethics/2010/12/10/december-10-2010-islamic-school/7629/
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LUCKY SEVERSON, correspondent: The first thing an outsider might notice at the Universal School in Buffalo is how well behaved the students are. The chaos that sometimes erupts between classes at public schools is not to be found here. Universal is an Islamic school for students in pre-K through eighth grade. It’s one of 240 private Islamic schools in the country and is supported through tuition and fundraising. Kathy Jamil is the principal.

KATHY JAMIL (Principal, Universal School, Buffalo, NY): We hope to instill in our children what it takes to be a responsible, caring and giving person who is God-conscious, and we believe we can only do that if we develop a whole child. So we focus on academics, but it’s just one small part of everything else, because we actually feel if we can hit the other realms, we feel like the academics just skyrocket.

SEVERSON: God-consciousness, they say, is meant to be a constant state of awareness of Allah throughout the day. Tamer Osman directs the Islamic studies program.

TAMER OSMAN (Director of Islamic Studies, Universal School): There are times when students are traveling in the hallway that maybe an adult’s eye may not be on them for just that moment. If they remember that God is watching, they may not do those type of things that we find in other schools, whether it is ridicule other students or bullying. We have a lot less of those types of things at the school here, and I think part of that reason is because we are trying to inculcate the idea of God-consciousness in the children.

SEVERSON: They are reminded of God five times each day during prayer. Universal is a state-accredited school so the students are taught the same curriculum as those in public schools and their test scores are on grade level or above. But here they’re also taught Arabic and Islamic studies, including the Quran and the sayings of the Prophet Muhammad. They learn about values from the teachings of the Prophet.

JAMIL: The Prophet, peace be upon him, as we believe, is the best of all mankind, and he embodied all the beautiful qualities and characteristics that we want to work on in our lives.

OSMAN: One of the wisdoms in Islamic schools today is that if you look at our core American values, they coincide with a lot of our Islamic values.

SEVERSON: Those shared interests apparently include the love of sports, like soccer, which is popular in many of the different countries these kids’ families emigrated from. But one of the challenges at Universal is to separate the religion from the attitudes of the culture they left behind—attitudes, for instance, detrimental to women.

JAMIL: I work with some domestic violence clients here in the US on relation to immigrant families and Muslim families and with the conversations that I have with the court systems, you will hear a man walk on, sit on the stand and say “I have the right to,” from a religious perspective, and we are there saying you absolutely do not. You clearly don’t understand your faith tradition.

SEVERSON: Islam considers homosexuality a sin, and in some Muslim countries the punishment is severe.

ALET SIAM (Eighth Grade Student, Universal School): Being gay is forbidden in Islam but you cannot make fun of that group or people who are like that. You’re supposed to be nice to everybody, but it’s still forbidden. You can’t do that.

OSMAN: As Muslims, we shouldn’t be judgmental. Just like in many of the other faiths it is frowned upon. It’s not seen as something that’s praiseworthy. But at the same time, it’s not—we don’t see it as if the person does that then that’s it, they are condemned forever.

SEVERSON: The school found its home in an unlikely place—a former Catholic church and convent. Students from Universal and St. Monica Catholic School share interfaith programs throughout the year. Nancy Langer is with St. Monica.

NANCY LANGER (President, NativityMiguel Middle School of Buffalo): What I’ve noticed is that they don’t seem to look at each other and see any differences. They seem to accept each other for who they are, and they’ve become instant friends. It’s really wonderful.

SEVERSON: Universal opened its doors three days before the 9/11 terrorists attacks. Suddenly there were bomb threats. Police were patrolling the school—not a good time to be a Muslim in America, and it was perhaps the worst time to open an Islamic school.

JAMIL: That evening we had an emergency board meeting. There was just silence. Everyone was quiet. We didn’t know what to say. We didn’t know what to think. We didn’t know what to do.

SEVERSON: Ultimately they decided that keeping the school open presented an opportunity to reach out to the inner-city neighborhood that surrounds the school. Ray Barker teaches social studies. He’s not a Muslim but is impressed with the mission of the school.

RAY BARKER (Social Studies Teacher, Universal School): It is really looking at developing the whole person through a moral structure set up by the religion. It very much is creating a strong foundation for them for these years and the rest of their lives.

MIRIAM AHMED (Eighth Grade Student, Universal School): You just do good in school.

SEVERSON(speaking to students): So are you good all the time?

For some parents, learning good values was only one reason they wanted their children in a religious school. Even before she gave birth to her three kids, Maha Zaatreh didn’t care whether they went to an Islamic school or a Catholic school as long as it wasn’t a public school.

MAHA ZAATREH: Discipline, really—that was my concern. Discipline, respect to their parents, respect to older people. That was my first goal.

OSMAN: Prophet Muhammad, peace and blessing be upon him, he talked about how important gentleness was—that God is gentle, and he loves gentleness. At our school you would find it very rare that you’d have a teacher raise their voice.

SEVERSON: They may not raise their voice but they do achieve discipline. Listen to Alet and Hakim.

ALET SIAM: You know that room downstairs right before you come up here, the library? In there you spend the whole day with the guy at the desk downstairs, Brother Jabor. Oh, man, he can give some punishments.

SEVERSON: Like what?

HAKIM ARMAN: He gives us all this writing to do. Sometimes, like last year, there was the other hall monitor. They’re kind of strict. If you walked down the wrong way, they make you walk up and down like 80 times.

ZAATREH: It gets me worried to know the fact that when my daughter is a teenager, she’s going to start thinking, “I want to date, I want to go here, I want to go there.”

SEVERSON: She needn’t worry about Universal. Dating is not allowed here for a host of reasons. Some are found in the Quran’s views on chastity when it refers to Miriam, whom Christians call Mary, the mother of Jesus.

OSMAN: In the Quran God uses Miriam as the example for our young girls, on how he had so much love for her because of her chastity, because of her modesty before God, because of her purity and her internal beauty, and that’s all part of it. We don’t want to necessarily come down on them and say dating is bad, dating is bad. Rather, we want to tell them how positive a healthy family is.

SEVERSON: Why do you think it is that they don’t want you to date?

ALET SIAM: Because you don’t want any like diseases. Like because of the STDs going around.

SEVERSON: Values are enforced and behaviors like gossip and bullying strongly condemned. Bullying is a very real and personal concern for these students. Some come looking for a safe environment.

(speaking to student): Why were you bullied?

HAKIM ARMAN: I was bullied because I’m Muslim. I got like punched a couple of times.

SEVERSON: Girls who wear the head scarf, the hijab, often feel the insecurity of being the object of stares, of being different. Some wear their hijabs only at school. Others wear them as a badge of honor.

KHADIJO ABDULLE (Eighth Grade Student, Universal School): I started wearing hijab when I was little in first grade. I have been wearing it since then, outside even, and people just used to look at me, and then I used to have to act like them and I didn’t want to do that. I wanted to be me.

SEVERSON: So it made you feel bad.

(speaking to students): Do you think Muslims get a bad rap in this country?

“We hope to instill in our children what it takes to be a responsible, caring, and giving person who is God-conscious,” says Kathy Jamil, principal of the Universal School in Buffalo./wnet/religionandethics/files/2010/12/post01-kathyjamil.jpg

]]>http://www.pbs.org/wnet/religionandethics/2010/12/10/december-10-2010-islamic-school/7629/feed/22American Muslims,Buffalo,character education,Education,Islam,moral education,Muslim schools,religious schools,Universal School"We hope to instill in our children what it takes to be a responsible, caring, and giving person who is God-conscious," says Kathy Jamil, principal of the Universal School in Buffalo."We hope to instill in our children what it takes to be a responsible, caring, and giving person who is God-conscious," says Kathy Jamil, principal of the Universal School in Buffalo.Religion & Ethics NewsWeeklyno8:25 Religious Schools and Tax Creditshttp://www.pbs.org/wnet/religionandethics/2010/11/05/november-5-2010-religious-schools-and-tax-credits/7422/
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School children reciting in unison: “John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, James Monroe…”

GLENN DENNARD: It literally was a dream. Private school was a dream. It was like man, one day I’d love to be able to. But with the scholarship program, you know, and our few nickels and pennies rubbed in together, we’re able to send every one of our children to private school.

TIM O’BRIEN, correspondent: Glenn and Rhonda Dennard of South Phoenix have six children, five of whom attended private schools. Students at the public schools in Arizona have scored low on standardized tests, and the Dennards felts public schools could not match the opportunities of nearby private schools.

DENNARD: Every one of my children that have now gone to college, and it’s been three, have all said their first year of college was easier than their two or three years of high school in the private school sector. That’s just a blessing.

O’BRIEN: A blessing because the Dennards don’t have much money and could never have afforded private schools without the help of fellow Arizona taxpayers. Arizona allows taxpayers to contribute $500 to private student tuition organizations, or STOs as they are called, and deduct the full amount of their contribution from their state income taxes—a dollar-for-dollar credit. Great for the Dennards and, it turns out, also great for church-run schools in Arizona, which flourished under the program, taking in some $30 million in tuition-credit donations last year alone. Lynn Hoffman is among a group of Phoenix taxpayers who challenged the Arizona program in court, arguing that the tuition tax credit unconstitutionally promotes religion at the expense of the state’s public schools.

LYNN HOFFMAN (Plaintiff): I do not believe that the money that a taxpayer owes to the general fund should be diverted as it is being, I believe, in this case to private parochial schools. We’re just diverting money out of our general fund to private schools, and I’m a public school adherent, and I believe that we should keep the money in the general fund for our public schools.

O’BRIEN: After bouncing around the lower courts for ten years, Hoffman’s challenge reached the US Supreme Court this week, with justices and lawyers debating a question more of semantics than of law: If the money doesn’t come out of the state treasury because it never went into the state treasury, is it still taxpayer money? Attorneys for the state’s largest STO say it is not.

DAVID CORTMAN (Attorney, Arizona Christian STO): We certainly take issue with the premise that this is government money. This is private taxpayer money, just like any other donation. It’s simply not the government’s money until you’ve reached the bottom line of the tax form and no sooner.

PAUL BENDER (Plaintiffs’ Attorney): When you give this money as a credit, you cannot keep that money. You either have to pay it to the state Department of Revenue or you have to give it to an STO. It’s not your money. “Your money” means you can keep it. You can’t keep this money.

O’BRIEN: If the STOs are funded by private, voluntary donations, as the state argues, they can pick and choose which students get scholarships and to which schools. They may also consider the students’ religious beliefs.

BENDER: The Arizona program distributes $30 million a year to people depending on their religion. You can get a scholarship if you’re Catholic from one tuition organization. You can’t get it if you’re Jewish. Another one will give it to Jews, but not to Catholics. That’s unconstitutional. The question is asked to a parent who comes to an STO, one of the religious STOs: “What’s your religion?” You can’t distribute government benefits by asking questions like that.

O’BRIEN: Justice Antonin Scalia appeared to defend the Arizona program and noted that donations to churches are tax deductible even though churches routinely favor their own members—an argument that resonated with STO lawyers.

CORTMAN: It is no different than if you give your charitable deduction to a church, and the church discriminates based on whatever religion it is, whether it’s Jewish or Muslim or whatever it happens to be. Every religious organization—quote, unquote—and I hate to use the word discriminate, but they choose who to affiliate with. This is no different.

O’BRIEN: That most of the money ends up going to Catholic or evangelical Christian schools, Cortman says, is not a problem.

CORTMAN: It’s interesting because statistics show that about 65 percent of the money goes to religious schools, but you have to keep in mind that 65 percent of the private schools are religious.

O’BRIEN: There is another wrinkle in this case that could be even more important than the tuition question. Arizona is also arguing that just because they are taxpayers, the plaintiffs here have suffered no real injury and thus have no right to even challenge the program in court. It’s a position the Obama administration embraced, writing in a friend of the court brief that the injury to taxpayers is “infinitesimally small and conjectural” and defending the Arizona tax credit as a “neutral program of private choice,” all to the dismay and surprise of proponents of strict separation of church and state.

BARRY LYNN (Americans United for Separation of Church and State): It is truly shocking that the Obama administration, through the solicitor general, has taken the position to deny access to the courts for Arizona taxpayers and to support what is unequivocally a direct funding of religious private schools.

O’BRIEN: More than the administration brief, President Obama’s court appointments could change the landscape on the issue of church and state. He replaced retiring Justices John Paul Stevens and David Souter, the court’s staunchest advocates of strict separation, with Justices Sonya Sotomayor and Elena Kagan, whose views are not as well known. It’s a new court, and this case could provide the first real glimpse of where it stands on church-state issues.

For Religion & Ethics NewsWeekly, I’m Tim O’Brien in Washington.

Arizona gives tax credits to people who donate money to school tuition organizations that provide student scholarships. A group of taxpayers claims most of the money goes to religious education./wnet/religionandethics/files/2010/11/thumb01-religiousschools.jpg

]]>http://www.pbs.org/wnet/religionandethics/2010/11/05/november-5-2010-religious-schools-and-tax-credits/7422/feed/1Arizona,Education,Obama Administration,private schools,public funds,religious schools,Separation of Church and State,STO,student tuition organizations,Supreme Court,tuition tax creditArizona gives tax credits to people who donate money to school tuition organizations that provide student scholarships. A group of taxpayers claims most of the money goes to religious education.Arizona gives tax credits to people who donate money to school tuition organizations that provide student scholarships. A group of taxpayers claims most of the money goes to religious education.Religion & Ethics NewsWeeklyno6:13 Supreme Court Previewhttp://www.pbs.org/wnet/religionandethics/2003/10/03/october-3-2003-supreme-court-preview/11955/
http://www.pbs.org/wnet/religionandethics/2003/10/03/october-3-2003-supreme-court-preview/11955/#commentsFri, 03 Oct 2003 17:52:53 +0000http://www.pbs.org/wnet/religionandethics/?p=11955More →

BOB ABERNETHY, anchor: The Supreme Court convenes on Monday — at least, most of the court does. Tim O’Brien looks at the cases the justices will consider.

TIM O’BRIEN: From the first bang of the gavel on this first Monday in October, the role of religion in our society will be on display. The justices will sit — but they won’t be hearing arguments in recognition of Yom Kippur, the holiest of Jewish holidays. That has not happened before.

The court’s two Jewish members, Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Stephen Breyer, are expected to take the day off.

One of the earliest issues the court will have to confront involves the Pledge of Allegiance in public schools. Students clearly do not have to participate. But an appeals court in California ruled merely standing by while classmates pledge allegiance to “one nation, under God” violates separation of church and state.

Congress added the words “under God” back in 1954, at the peak of the Cold War, in part to distinguish the United States from what was called “godless Communism.” But last February the lower court found that adding those two words “impermissibly takes a position with respect to the purely religious question of the existence and identity of God.”

In another case later this fall, the court will consider a new twist in the debate over state aid for religious instruction: not whether states may subsidize religious instruction, but whether they must.

The case involves a theology student at Northwest College, a Christian school in Kirkland, Washington. Because the state constitution prohibits any aid to religion, students majoring in theology are disqualified from competing for a state-sponsored scholarship. The lower court ruled that singling out theology majors for exclusion violates their First Amendment right to the free exercise of their religion.

There are some issues that seem to return to the court every year — issues that sharply divide the justices just as they do the country. Religion is one of them; the death penalty is another. It’s mentioned several times in the Constitution itself and it still enjoys broad popular support. So the court is not going to find capital punishment unconstitutional per se — but there are lingering questions about the ability of our justice system to implement it fairly.

There are currently more than 3,500 inmates on Death Row in the United States. The court has agreed to consider the case of one of them: Delma Banks, who has been on Death Row in Texas longer than any other inmate — more than 20 years.

In what could be a made-for-TV drama, Banks was within 10 minutes of being executed last spring when the high court agreed to consider his claims that prosecutors failed to turn over exculpatory evidence and that he was also denied the effective assistance of counsel.

The biggest news from the court on its first day, Monday, will be in the cases it doesn’t take. Nearly 2,000 cases have been submitted for review. But the court is selective; most, if not all of these cases will be rejected. Denying review sets no binding precedent for other courts to follow. But whatever the lower court had ruled stands. It’s the justices’ way of saying yes by saying no.

RELIGION & ETHICS NEWSWEEKLY previews upcoming U.S Supreme Court cases. At issue are recitation of the Pledge of Allegiance in schools, state funding for religious education, and the case of Death Row inmate Delma Banks./wnet/religionandethics/files/2003/10/supremecourtpreview-thumb.jpg